Now,
however, this threatening homogeneity has been loosening up, and an alternative
is beginning to break into the repressive continuum. This alternative is not so much a different
road to socialism as an emergence of different goals and values, different
aspirations in the men and women who resist and deny the massive exploitative
power of corporate capitalism even in its most comfortable and liberal
realizations. The Great Refusal takes a
variety of forms.
Herbert Marcuse, "Preface," An Essay on Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, p. vii.
The search
for specific historical agents of revolutionary change in the advanced
capitalist countries is indeed meaningless.
Revolutionary forces emerge in the process of change itself; the
translation of the potential into the actual is the work of political
practice.”
Herbert Marcuse, "Preface," An Essay on Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, p. 79.
In this
transformation, the Women’s Liberation Movement becomes a radical force to the
degree to which it transcends the entire sphere of aggressive needs and
performances, the entire social organization and division of functions. In other words, the movement becomes radical
to the degree to which it aims, not only at equality within the job and value structure of the established society (which would be the equality of dehumanization)
but rather at a change in the structure itself (the basic demands of equal opportunity, equal pay, and release from full-time household and child care are a prerequisite).
Herbert Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” in Andrew Feenberg and Wiliam Leiss, eds., The
Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse, Boston: Beacon Press, 2007, p. 246. [Note: This essay, "Nature and Revolution," first appeared in Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.]
Herbert Marcuse gained world renown during the 1960s
as a philosopher, social theorist, and political activist, celebrated in the
media as "father of the New Left." University professor and author of
many books and articles, Marcuse won notoriety when he was perceived as both an
influence on and defender of the "New Left" in the United States and
Europe. His theory of "one-dimensional" society provided critical
perspectives on contemporary capitalist and state communist societies and his
notion of "the great refusal" won him renown as a theorist of
revolutionary change and "liberation from the affluent society."
Consequently, he became one of the most influential intellectuals in the United
States during the 1960s and into the 1970s. And yet, ultimately, it may be his
contributions to philosophy that are most significant and in this entry I shall
attempt to specify Marcuse's contributions to contemporary philosophy and his
place in the narrative of continental philosophy.
Douglas Kellner, Illuminations http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell12.htm
Marcuse, on the
other hand, constantly advocated the "Great Refusal" as the proper
political response to any form of irrational repression, and indeed this seems
to be at least the starting point for political activism in the contemporary
era: refusal of all forms of oppression and domination, relentless criticism of
all policies that impact negatively on working people and progressive social
programs, and militant opposition to any and all acts of aggression against
Third World countries. Indeed, in an era of "positive thinking,"
conformity, and Yuppies who "go for it," it seems that Marcuse's
emphasis on negative thinking, refusal, and opposition provides at least a
starting point and part of a renewal of radical politics in the contemporary
era.
Douglas Kellner, Illuminations http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell13a.htm
…Marcuse always attempted to link his critical theory
with the most radical political movements of the day and to thus politicize his
philosophy and social theory. Thus, I am suggesting that Marcuse's thought
continues to provide important resources and stimulus for radical theory and
politics in the present age. Marcuse himself was open to new theoretical and
political currents, yet remained loyal to those theories which he believed
provided inspiration and substance for the tasks of the present age.
Consequently, as we confront the theoretical and political problems of the day,
I believe that the works of Herbert Marcuse provide important resources for our
current situation and that a Marcusean renaissance could help inspire new
theories and politics for the contemporary era, providing continental
philosophy with new impulses and tasks.
Douglas Kellner, Illuminations http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell12.htm
As I understand it, critical theory is a
normative reflection that is historically and socially contextualized. Critical
theory rejects as illusory the effort to construct a universal normative system
insulated from a particular society.
Normative reflection must begin from historically specific circumstances
because there is but what is, the given, the situated interest in justice, from
which to start. Reflecting from within a
particular social context, good normative theorizing cannot avoid social and
political description and explanation.
Without social theory, normative reflection is abstract, empty, and
unable to guide criticism with a practical interest in emancipation. Unlike positivist social theory, however,
which separates social facts from values, and claims to be value-neutral,
critical theory denies that social theory must accede to the given. Social description and explanation must be
critical, that is, aim to evaluate the given in normative terms. Without such a critical stance, many
questions about what occurs in a society and why, who benefits and who is
harmed, will not be asked, and social theory is liable to reaffirm and reify
the given social reality.
Critical
theory presumes that the normative ideals used to criticize a society are rooted
in experience of and reflection on that
very society, and that norms can come from nowhere else. But what does this mean, and how is it
possible for norms to be both socially based and measures of society? Normative reflection arises from hearing a
cry of suffering or distress, or feeling distress oneself. The philosopher is
always socially situated, and if the society is divided by oppressions, she
either reinforces or struggles against them.
With an emancipatory interest, the philosopher apprehends given social
circumstances not merely in contemplation but with passion: the given is
experienced in relation to desire.
Desire, the desire to be happy, creates the distance, the negation, that
opens the space for criticism of what is.
This critical distance does not occur on the basis of some previously
discovered rational ideas of the good and the just. On the contrary, the ideas of the good and the just arise from the
desiring negation that action brings to what is given.
Critical
theory is a mode of discourse which projects normative possibilities unrealized
but felt in a particular given social reality.
Each social reality presents its own unrealized possibilities,
experienced as lacks and desires. Norms and ideals arise from the yearning that
is an expression of freedom: it does not
have to be this way, it could be otherwise. Imagination is the faculty of transforming
the experience of what is into a
projection of what could be, the faculty that frees thought to form ideals and
norms.
Herbert
Marcuse describes this genesis of ideals from an experience of the
possibilities desired but unrealized in the given:
Now,
there is a large class of concepts—we dare say, the philosophically relevant concepts—where the quantitative relation
between the universal and the particular assumes a qualitative aspect, where the abstract,
universal seems to designate potentialities in a concrete, historical
sense. However "man,"
"nature," "justice," "beauty," or
"freedom" may be defined, they synthesize experiential contents into
ideas which transcend their particular realizations as something to be
surpassed, overcome. Thus the concept of
beauty comprehends all the beauty not yet
realized; the conception of freedom all the liberty not yet attained.
…
Such
universals thus appear as conceptual instruments for understanding the
particular conditions of things in light of their potentialities. They are
historical and supra-historical; they conceptualize the stuff of which the
experienced world consists, and they conceptualize it with a view of its
possibilities, in the light of their actual limitation, suppression, and
denial. Neither the experience nor the judgment
is private. The philosophic concepts are
formed and developed in the consciousness of a general condition in a historical
continuum; they are elaborated from an individual position within a specific
society. The stuff of thought is
historical stuff—no matter how abstract, general, or pure, it may become in
philosophic or scientific theory.
{Herbert
Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in
the Ideology of Advanced Society, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964, pp. 214-215.}
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the
Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp.
5-6.
Although
American Society invented itself by exploiting certain social groups, it is
still an experiment, an unfinished project.
One of Marcuse’s great gifts was his ability to see the potential for a
qualitatively different form of life in the very social structures which he
viewed as oppressive. Marcuse’s form of
dialectical or negative thinking is as vital today as during his lifetime. Marcuse never tired of looking for the
revolutionary subject. For this reason I
think that it is important to put him in conversation with the new
revolutionary subjects in philosophy.
Arnold L. Farr, Critical Theory and Democratic Vision: Herbert Marcuse and Recent Liberation Philosophies, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009, p. 10.
This new
social order requires an alteration of the instinctual structure of human
beings in oppressive and repressive societies.
The alteration of society and of the human instincts must occur
simultaneously in a dialectical relationship.
That is, one does not necessarily precede the other. What is required for the actualization of
such a vision is a new orientation in thought, a new model for education, and
the development of more of what Marcuse called catalyst groups. We must continue to struggle in hope that the
specter of liberation that haunts
Western philosophy and society will eventually dwell among us in the
flesh.
Arnold L. Farr, Critical Theory and Democratic Vision: Herbert Marcuse and Recent Liberation Philosophies, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009, p. 178.
Once capitalism invades the whole of life, then
struggle involves the whole of life.
Rick Roderick, "The Emancipatory Challenge of Critical Theory," Video Interview of Rick Roderick by Ann Buttimer at University of Texas, Austin, Texas, 1987.
Not every problem someone has with his
girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.
Herbert Marcuse, The Listener [magazine], 1978.
Marcuse combined a wonderful European intellectual heritage drawn
from Marx and Freud with a love and appreciation of American popular culture.
Rick Roderick, "The Emancipatory Challenge of Critical Theory,"
Video Interview of Rick Roderick by Ann Buttimer at University of Texas,
Austin, Texas, 1987.
… to study Critical Theory as a way of escaping the
isolation of disciplines within universities and as a point of struggle within
the university system and trying to make link-ups with alternatives in the
working class movement at large.
Rick Roderick, "The Emancipatory Challenge of Critical Theory,"
Video Interview of Rick Roderick by Ann Buttimer at University of Texas,
Austin, Texas, 1987.
What makes theory critical? In 1929 Herbert Marcuse was a graduate student in
a seminar of Martin Heidegger's called "Introduction to Academic Study." Marcuse
took notes almost verbatim of Heidegger's discussion of Plato's myth of the
cave: "Today we do not even know what we are to be liberated from. Yet it is
exactly this knowledge that is the condition of every genuine emancipation."* I argue that critical knowledge is knowledge
that enables the social negation of the social negation of human life's core
activities, the most central of which is creative labor. Any refusal to engage
in just this sort of critique — taking refuge instead in the philosophical
distance found in art or glorious academic alienation — is precisely what
genuine critical thinking must refuse to do. Thisis the sense in which critical
theorizing becomes the source of a social intelligence that inspires the
ingenuity and the action required to advance politically toward the
non-alienated character, conscience, and culture which is humanity's
birthright.
Charles Reitz, "Liberating the Critical in Critical Theory: Transcending Marcuse on Alienation, Art and the Humanities," Paper presented at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, Massachusetts, August, 1998 [The Paideia Archive / Philosophy of Education].
*Martin Heidegger in Marcuse's notes to seminar, "Heidegger, Einfuhrung in das akademische Studium. Sommer 1929" Herbert Marcuse Archiv of the Stadt- und Universit. tsbibliothek, Frankfurt,
Catalog # 0013.01, p. 6.
The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the
gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no
success, it remains negative. Thus it wants to remain loyal to those who,
without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal.
At the beginning of the fascist era, Walter Benjamin wrote:
Nur um der Hoffnungslosen willen ist uns die Hoffnung
gegeben.
It
is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, p. 257. [the closing portion of the book]